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From Rock Star To Coffee King

As the drummer of Aerosmith, Joey Kramer has spent the past few decades touring all over the world, keeping weird hours and sticking to tight schedules. In all that time on the road and in studios he’s had to pour a whole lotta bad coffee down his neck. Now, with a little more downtime on his hands, he’s working to strike a blow against terrible java and make a few dollars doing it.

Kramer’s new endeavor is a coffee brand he calls Rockin’ & Roastin’, a company that boasts three types of organic coffee that carry the 64 year-old Rock Hall of Famer’s stamp of approval. “I’m very grateful for my career as a musician but I always wanted to have my own business,” he says. “I just never had the time to do it.”

The easing of tour-time gave Kramer the opportunity and he sought out figures that could help him turn his fondness for coffee into an enterprise. He linked with brother-in-law Ronnie Mann – a VP at Hewlett Packard – and attorney Frank Cimler. He made them both partners, handing each an undisclosed amount of equity. “The one thing I knew right from the beginning was that in order for someone to participate in the business that I was going to do – and put as much passion and as much energy into it as I was willing to – they had to be part of it.”

Kramer zeroed in on his favorite bean-producers – Guatemala, Ethiopia and Sumatra – and went through the process of finding the right brew of ingredients. Says Cimler : “We started up with a small batch roaster and we started to realize that we were going to get vendor agreements from big retail organizations and we weren’t in a positon to scale the business. It was going to be too much demand.”

The fledgling brand inked a deal with Comfort Foods to produce product at scale and it’s a good thing they did—the company’s found fans among retailers and customers like Costco, all locations of The House of Blues and a slew of retailers and restaurants.

So far the company is available in over 2,000 grocery locations in 14 states on the east coast. A partnership with Sysco Corporation is delivering the coffee too “hundreds of restaurants and hotels and golf resorts,” says Cimler.

So how’s the company doing so far? Between August and December of last year (when the brands hit retail shelves) Rockin’ & Roastin’ took in about $400,000 in sales. It broke $1 million within the first six months of 2014, projected to hit $2 million by yearend. “It’s going by leaps and bounds,” Kramer claims. Recent successes include winning orders from school districts and corporate accounts with Comcast, Arbella Insurance, Nokia and others.

Kramer’s recognition as a rock and roll musician is indeed a selling point for the brand – his signature and Aerosmith connection are on the front of each bag of beans – but his desire to become an entrepreneur is one that he loudly proclaims, especially in the business of selling a product he feels passionate about. “I don’t really consider myself a businessman yet, I’m still in the learning stages—learning from my partners.”